Mick Turner: Marlan Rosa

Mick Turner's guitar work is an unfairly overlooked component of Dirty Three's evocative, epic instrumentals, relegated to the background by Warren Ellis' overpowering violin. But without his moody, unsettling melodic foundation, not to mention Jim White's seemingly arrhythmic drumming, the band's music would carry little dramatic weight. Fortunately, Turner has been given the opportunity to showcase his abilities on a series of recordings—both solo and with White as Tren Brothers—that place his haunting guitar loops and subtly formidable arrangement skills in the foreground. Without the grounding of White's percussion, Turner's solo work carries a tendency to drift in and out of the listener's consciousness; especially on the new Marlan Rosa, he often constructs his recordings around dreamy, languid song fragments that fade in and out. Turner gets a bit more ambitious as he goes along, allowing "El Arbol" to unspool into a disconcerting seven-minute epic, complete with a creepy piano and muttered voices in the background, while the similarly lengthy "There's A Great Burning Red Moon Rising On The Lake" offers the album's most striking application of Jessica Billey's unobtrusive violin. Billey's presence on three of Marlan Rosa's 15 tracks reverses the Dirty Three formula of violins drowning out guitars, but with Turner in the mix, it works either way. These tracks aren't quite as moving or powerful as most of Dirty Three's exceptional work, but Marlan Rosa provides another worthy snapshot of Turner's considerable talent.